Media streaming on premise

hi experts, my boss said they are thinking of streaming recorded media from the corporate office. Its small scale right now but could grow if the idea takes off. Problem is I am a sys admin never set this up before. A quick search found some hosted solutions which I suggested but they still want to have an idea of what it would take to set that up at the main office. Any links or suggestions to get me started? I have found a lot of stuff but I cant spend $100k on a SAN and Multi Gigabit internet links from the ISP. The web guy is already building the site.
thanks for any suggestions?

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If this is recorded stuff, and you have a dev team, why not just host the data at the sites locally, and update the content. Push down an updated AVI or whatever to a local PC, and the site could access that to stream the media.

there is a difference between media streaming and simple media presenting. streaming usually has the content in different bit rates and will scale depending upon the clients ability to display .. For in house a simple htm5 video player or jwplayer will suffice.

WAMSINCAuthor Commented: 2015-08-19

Sorry Im new at this if they keep it here what is required to host it here at the main office? Provided they build the website, Im wondering what is required on the infrastructure side, wouldn't we need an extremely expensive amount of bandwidth to stream video, and a SAN, etc ?

Yes, but that may depend on what you have already, what is your current bandwidth. I am just assuming this is the occasional training video or company announcement, you are not trying to be youtube. Do the sites have local internet?

Bandwidth was one of the reasons I was thinking a local video source and not streamed from a corporate office.

wouldn't we need an extremely expensive amount of bandwidth to stream video, and a SAN
They will be using your internal network bandwidth. And it depends.. length and quality of the video, # of clients (peak) An SSD would be nice to have.. If you go the IIS route you can add the media server add on and this will allow for multi-casting.

WAMSINCAuthor Commented: 2015-08-19

so what they want is to have some industry specific training videos and host them here and charge existing clients for odd ball certifications and other continuing education. They want to take credit cards which is its own nightmare [PCI Compliance] but they have a couple hundred clips, about a terabyte of content at the moment. We have 50Mbps down and 30Mbps up. We have an aging sonicwall that is already at 30% all the time, no available storage and a couple dedicated web production servers. It doesnt seem to me that we have enough resources here and Im not sure if I can get away with a low budget NAS for hosting content.

WAMSINCAuthor Commented: 2015-08-19

Just wanted to add after a re-read, they are trying to create a website to sell training to a very small specific market.. Im guessing its going to be something like the websites for Pluralsight or cbtnuggets as an example in another market. They will charge people for access to streaming content.

maybe a different beast in that case, as you grow, yes big circuits and storage, you will probably want to look into hosted CDN. Especially as a pilot something like vzaar.com (google search for video hosting cdn) will let you grow into it, if the monthly gets out of hand you can bring it in house.

missed the other post too, but yes you are under provisioned at some point. You may be better moving it to the cloud and even offloading credit cards to a firm that is already PCI complaint. vzaar may be costly start but I bet a little research will find something better.

WAMSINCAuthor Commented: 2015-08-19

makes sense that what I was trying to tell them earlier today. So I can show them that its cost prohibitive what would I need to conservatively bring that in house?
an SSD or SAS NAS ? How do you figure the amount of bandwidth required?

that is a much tougher question. So I would start be looking at the bandwidth requirement, take a look at this: , for 240p 300 - 700k per stream, go low, 300k.

then factor how many sessions at the same time, and multiple. Not a definitive, but a good start, so say 3mbps/10 simultaneous streams, assuming all unique videos and not multicasting.

That said your provider may not be happy with you setting up a streaming service, some contracts prohibit it. Then a small server to handle, I don't think you have to go crazy until you have a lot of connections. So spec a decent server with raid and maybe SSD. probably $7k - $10k if you use HP or IBM. those would be rough numbers, plus maybe a new router.

these are just rough without the pie-in-the-sky numbers. You tell me a 1000 simultaneous users and their will be some big changes.

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What you have added is a game changer.
host the site on S3 or Azure (take advantage of the scaling options) My preference is Azure. in time you may want to use a CDN like Cachefly or others. definitely use a payment gateway, security and compliance are not trivial items for security.. Use an expert at it and save yourself the headache .Also use cloudflare as your DNS provider (provides some caching as well)